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      It’s not just Trump v Harris: America’s men and women are also locked in battle now | Jonathan Freedland

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      I hesitate to give JD Vance any ideas, but if American women were denied the vote, Donald Trump would be restored to the White House in a landslide. Similarly, if men were removed from the franchise, Kamala Harris would be swept into the Oval Office in an even bigger earthquake. As it is, the two are clashing in an election marked by a gulf so wide, the phrase “gender gap” doesn’t do it justice. In ways that go deeper than mere politics, and with implications for the world beyond the US, the presidential election is increasingly looking like a war between men and women.The numbers are stunning. An NBC poll this week found men favour Trump over Harris by 12 points, 52% to 40%. Among women, Harris leads Trump by 21 points: 58% to 37%. Put the two together and you have a gender chasm of 33 points. Men may not be from Mars and women may not be from Venus, but when it comes to choosing a US president, they are on different planets.What explains it? The most obvious answer is that Trump’s record, including a court ruling that he had committed rape and his own admission of serial sexual assault, boasting that he grabbed women “by the pussy”, makes him repellent to tens of millions of women, none of that reduced by appointing a sidekick who speaks of “childless cat ladies”. Similar explanatory power attaches to the 2022 decision by the supreme court, in the Dobbs case, to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion. Since then, it’s been up to the 50 states whether to grant or withhold that right from women, and 22 of them have chosen to deny it. That shift is on Trump, who nominated three of the six supreme court judges who made the Dobbs decision, an achievement of which he has said he is “proud”.But while the move delighted Trump’s evangelical Christian supporters, it has cost him dear. Dobbs did not just anger American women, it mobilised them. In the midterm elections of 2022, as high inflation fuelled disaffection with Joe Biden, Republicans assumed they would ride a “red wave” to victory. That wave never came, in part because women, furious at the court’s ruling and Republicans’ part in it, turned out in big numbers to vote against them. And while Biden has never been fully comfortable speaking about abortion, Dobbs is widely regarded as the moment Harris found her voice as a national figure.Still, the long-running battle over abortion rights only explains one side of the gender divide. Less obvious is that, as much as women are pulling away from Trump, large numbers of men, especially young men, are drawn towards him.Here, the numbers are even more striking. Attitude surveys show that women between the ages of 18 and 29 are the most progressive group in US history. Meanwhile, a majority of men the same age back Donald Trump. A poll of six battleground states last month found among gen Z voters a gender gulf of 51 points.Part of it is explained by Trump’s trade in swaggering machismo, offering a kind of cartoonish manliness. In recent months that part of his act has only got louder. His supporters always wore T-shirts showing Trump’s face superimposed on a ripped, Rambo-style body, but now they have the image of his bloodied face, fist pumped in the air, seconds after the assassination attempt on him in July, as he urged his followers to “Fight, fight, fight!”There is nothing subtle about this. At his party convention in Milwaukee he was introduced by wrestler Hulk Hogan and the man behind the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Bear in mind that one study of young people around the world found that while young women were most concerned about issues such as “sexual harassment, domestic violence, child abuse and mental health”, young men were more focused on “competition, bravery, and honour”.In his own crude way, Trump speaks to that. I saw it for myself earlier this year in New Hampshire, where I encountered young male voters proudly declaring they were voting for “Donald J Trump”, all but saluting as they pronounced that middle initial.The performative masculinity includes a strong element of defiance. Trump’s disregard for the norms and etiquette that govern most politicians shows a contempt for strictures that are seen as constraining men in particular. When he breaks the rules, it’s often men who cheer because they feel those rules shackle them too – and they’re sick of being told off. As one 20-year-old Trump voter complained to the New York Times, US society no longer “lets boys be boys”. As he put it: “Men my age, from a very young age we were told, ‘You’re not supposed to do this, you’re not supposed to do that, you’re just supposed to sit here and be quiet.’” Trump is anything but quiet.Running alongside all this is the strong conviction that increased diversity and advances for women pose a threat to men. A third of men who back Trump believe that gains for women have come at men’s expense, a figure that rises to 40% among men under-50 who support the former president. This resentment surfaces in the casual misogyny that is a Trump tic, and which informs the “manosphere” that he is doing so much to cultivate: the realm of podcasters and social media influencers that delights in a blend of old school sexism and mocking humour that fits Trump perfectly.Toxic as those voices might be, they succeed because the resentment they feed on is real. If plenty of young American men feel they’re getting left behind, that’s because on multiple key measures they are. As the scholar Richard Reeves has set out, American boys are trailing behind girls whether in readiness to start elementary school or graduation from university. Men have lost their place as the default family breadwinner, and watched as many of the jobs they once regarded as their own, including manual work requiring no degree, have vanished. When it comes to finding a partner, or even just having friends, men lag behind.These are trends affecting all men, which might help explain why Trump has made unexpected inroads not only with non-graduate white men, but also with men of colour, especially the young in both groups. They feel beleaguered – and see in Trump someone who sees them.Now, there’s a good chance that the gender chasm will ultimately help Harris. Women tend to vote in greater numbers than men, and they’re with her. But polls have a habit of underestimating Trump and there could be an army of young men, out of pollsters’ reach, who feel that a woman in the Oval Office would be one feminist advance too many. The Taylor Swift endorsement is welcome, but the Harris campaign could do with a thumbs-up from someone with serious influence over young men. It doesn’t help that the “who we serve” page of the Democrats’ own website features a long list of groups, including women, but makes no equivalent offer to men.I don’t expect any of this came up when Keir Starmer met Trump this week, but there is a warning here that should sound far beyond America’s shores. As one US thinktank puts it: “History is littered with examples of nations suffering from the consequences of young men finding themselves idle without purpose.” The gender gap is becoming dangerously wide. It must not become an abyss.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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      The real victims of Olivia Nuzzi’s affair with RFK Jr are other female journalists | Moira Donegan

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      Anyone who is not a moralist or kidding themselves will admit that a good piece of gossip is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Gossip exposes the false sanctimony of the powerful: it reveals the smug and self-righteous to be grubby, selfish and embarrassing – just like the rest of us. If the pronouncements of politicians make history, and the reporting of the media shapes that history’s official narrative, gossip runs along behind them, like a bratty younger sibling, filling in their omissions to tell a truer story. “You left out this part.” “That’s not what you told me.”Maybe this is why media gossip about journalists and politicians carries such a frisson of transgressive delight: it breaks their monopoly on narrative authority. The people who have been appointed to tell us stories about our world, and about ourselves, finally get themselves subjected to the same treatment. It helps, too, to bust the bubble of a media industry that has long demanded more moral gravitas than it has really earned. These are the people, after all, who claim to be holding power to account. But how do they actually behave towards those in power?And so it was maybe predictable that so many people would feel a gleeful jolt of schadenfreude last week, when New York Magazine revealed that it had suspended Olivia Nuzzi, a young star reporter known for her biting wit and deep bench of Republican sources. The cause? Nuzzi had allegedly admitted to sexting with one of her reporting subjects: the anti-vax crusader, animal corpse desecrator, former presidential candidate and brain worm host Robert F Kennedy Jr.Love is blind, and it could be that Nuzzi simply has unconventional taste. But the incident has taken on heavy symbolic proportions, becoming a litmus test within media circles for various opinions on journalistic ethics, how to earn and keep readers’ trust, and the journalists’ vexed obligations to the truth in an industry where models of “access journalism” routinely incentivize them to have close – even cozy – relationships with those they cover.Nuzzi, in particular, has a talent for getting incendiary and controversial figures on the right to say things that they probably shouldn’t, and media watchers have long speculated that this might be because of her own conservative leanings: that she is able to ingratiate herself to rightwing subjects because she is able to convince them that she offers a sympathetic ear. In that much, at least, any honest journalist will have to admit that Nuzzi is not alone. But she seems to have taken her sympathy for her subjects far beyond the industry baseline.Not everyone finds Nuzzi’s conduct objectionable on journalistic grounds. Ben Smith, the former New York Times media columnist who now runs the outlet Semafor, used his newsletter to ask what all the fuss was about. He claimed that British journalists had texted him to the effect of: “If you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?”The NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik characterizes this statement from Smith as “bananas”. We might also add that it is insulting to Smith’s colleagues, be they American, British or anything else – and in particular, to the women. It implies that there are large numbers of female journalists trading sex for access. There are not. It is rare, and more than frowned upon, for journalists to sleep with their sources or subjects: doing so compromises the integrity of the work. And most female journalists, like most female professionals in any field, are not interested in trading on their sexuality for professional advancement.And yet Smith’s defense of Nuzzi was not the only comment that seemed to take a kind of prurient delight in the story. Almost immediately, RFK Jr sympathizers started leaking stories to the media that seemed aimed at minimizing his own role in the relationship and portraying Nuzzi as a sex-starved obsessive, who “bombarded” the Kennedy scion against his will with “increasingly pornographic photos and videos that he found difficult to resist”, in the words of Jessica Reed Kraus. Sure.Other outlets, eager to credulously repeat these claims, took a similar track. The New York Post ran a story to this effect that featured an image of Nuzzi in a bikini. Another journalist, Keith Olbermann, chimed in with the irrelevant and unhelpful information that he also dated Nuzzi once, back when he was in his mid-50s and she was in her early 20s. The Daily Beast went to far as to publish a gross fictionalization of Nuzzi and RFK Jr’s correspondence.The schadenfreude has changed its tenor: from delight in the revealed hypocrisies of the powerful to delight in the sexual humiliation of a woman. It is assumed that it is Nuzzi’s sexuality itself – rather than her decision to direct it toward a subject of her reporting – that disqualifies her from public dignity.Let’s be clear: Nuzzi is not a victim. There is no indication that her relationship with RFK Jr was anything but consensual, however distasteful we may find it. Nor does she appear to be a woman of robust feminist commitments. Not only has Nuzzi routinely cozied up to powerful Republican political players, but until recently she was engaged to the Politico writer Ryan Lizza, who was fired from the New Yorker in 2017 for alleged sexual misconduct. The misogyny directed against her, then, raises an uncomfortable question for feminists: how do we criticize the actions of patriarchal women without falling into the trap of perpetuating misogyny against them?The most ungenerous interpretation of Nuzzi’s career – which is not necessarily the most likely one – is that she used her youth and good looks to her advantage, flattering the egos of men who could get her jobs or serve as sources. In this scenario, she would have made a trade-off – sexual attention for professional opportunity. There is a tendency to demonize this kind of use of sexuality by women (and a less pronounced, usually tardy tendency to criticize such trades when they are demanded or accepted by men). It is this tendency, feeding off the unspoken and unproven assumptions about just what Nuzzi and RFK Jr were offering each other, that has led to all the slut-shaming of Nuzzi in the media.Women who make such trades are not necessarily unequipped for the jobs they get by them: talent and corruption often coexist in one person. (And whatever the controversies and uncertainties about Nuzzi herself, there is no dispute that she is very talented.) But the problem with such transactions, where they do happen, is not that the women who make them are sluts. It is that they are scabs. Such trade-offs can be consensual, but they can never really be ethical: they make it harder for other women in their industries who are not willing or able to use their sexuality to advance to do so; they set the precedent that sex for opportunity is an acceptable trade to make to female workers; they encourage men to leverage their professional power to extract sexual favors. They cast all female professionals under the suspicion of corruptibility and unseriousness.Whatever Nuzzi was doing, she doesn’t seem to have been thinking much about her female colleagues; she appears to have mostly been thinking about herself. But she’s not the only one in this scenario who deserves our attention. Spare a thought for the other women working in journalism – including many of Nuzzi’s colleagues at New York Magazine – who will now be embarrassed by unfair comparisons to her. If there’s a victim in this story, it’s them.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘Be a man and vote for a woman’: Kamala Harris’s unlikely edge in America’s masculinity election

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      A man in a baseball cap strides through a field of corn. A woman in flannel turns and smiles, a line of trucks visible behind her. As piano music swells, an American flag ripples in a gentle breeze. This video is pure, uncut Americana. Naturally, it’s a political ad.Specifically, it’s an ad made by the Lincoln Project, a group of moderates and former Republicans united by a desire to topple Donald Trump and support Kamala Harris. And it’s making one of the most obvious appeals to men and masculinity yet in the 2024 election.As the ad nears its crescendo, the deep voice of Sam Elliott, an actor best known for playing grizzled but folksy cowboy types, demands: “What the hell are you waiting for? Because if it’s the woman thing, it’s time to get over that.” He continues: “It’s time to be a man and vote for a woman.”Masculinity and people’s views on gender roles may be more important than ever in 2024 – and not just because Harris is the first woman of color to ever secure a major-party nomination for president. The 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade thrust women’s rights to the forefront of the election. Numerous identity-based groups, including White Dudes for Harris, have gathered to drum up enthusiasm. An extreme gender gap has also yawned open among the youngest US voters: having come of age in the era of #MeToo, gen Z women are becoming the most progressive and politically active cohort ever measured – while gen Z men are increasingly apathetic to politics and drifting further to the right.Conservatives are openly using anxiety around masculinity to win this election, telling men that their problems stem from not being man enough. Josh Hawley, the influential Republican senator from Missouri, published a book called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. The Fox News host Jesse Watters went even further.“I don’t see why any man would vote Democrat. It’s not the party of virtue, security. It’s not the party of strength,” Watters said, shortly after White Dudes for Harris held a call with more than 190,000 participants. Watters added: “I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”Watters is not a serious person, but Americans’ obsession with masculinity is, to the point that it can determine the outcome even of presidential elections where two men are running. (So, most of them.) Americans revere presidents as role models, fixating on their status – real or perceived – as founding fathers, real fathers, war heroes, and masters of diplomacy and making money and cheating on their wives without getting caught (or, at least, without getting divorced). Because presidents epitomize American notions of manhood, elections reveal what kind of man, what type and degree of masculinity, is most respected and deserving of power.View image in fullscreenTrump has turned his campaign into a pitch for hyper-traditional masculinity. At this year’s Republican national convention, he walked on stage to the James Brown song It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and was introduced by Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship who was caught slapping his wife on camera. On the campaign trail, he has hammed it up with YouTubers and podcasters who have male-centric audiences and dim views of women.With the general public and her opponent so preoccupied by masculinity, Harris is not emphasizing her pioneering nomination. Rather, in order to win a contest that no woman has ever won, she’s trying to take advantage of stereotypes about men, women and leadership – and, when they can’t work in her favor, using them to kneecap Trump instead.Masculinity, it turns out, may be the most partisan issue in US politics.A few good menWhen people conjure up the image of a “good man” or a “real man”, they tend to imagine the same qualities: someone who is dominant, successful and tough – and who is nothing like women, according to Theresa Vescio, a psychology professor who studies gender, politics and privilege at Penn State.This way of thinking is so pervasive that people gender political matters that, objectively, have no sex. National defense and the economy are seen as topics that men care about, because men are expected to prize being providers for and protectors of their families. Healthcare – including abortion rights – and education are seen as women’s issues, because women are supposed to be compassionate caregivers. (In reality, at least among gen Z, young women care about all of these issues more than young men do.) Even the political parties themselves are gendered: Republicans are associated with more masculine issues and traits, Democrats with feminine ones.These stereotypes inform American ideals of the presidency. “What we expect in a good leader is that they’re powerful, high status, top, able to lead. That overlaps substantially with stereotypes of masculinity and men,” Vescio said. “So when we think about who would be a good leader, stereotypes of men fit and complement. There’s no incongruity.”They complement one another so seamlessly, in fact, that the role of masculinity in elections was once invisible. We’re so used to seeing men run for office, and seeing “gender” only become a buzzword when a woman steps into the fray, that we often don’t even recognize that men have a gender, let alone that male candidates offer up different, competing visions of masculinity.But they do compete, even in the most animalistic ways. For example, presidential candidates are more likely to succeed when they have one key, traditionally masculine physical quality: height.The taller candidate is more likely to win more votes and be re-elected; they are also more likely to be seen by experts as being better leaders and simply “greater”. This link between height and presidential preference is so strong and so subconscious that when Richard Nixon ran against John F Kennedy in 1960, voters tended to think their chosen candidate was taller. (Kennedy was taller, and he won.) Ron DeSantis might have been laughed at for reportedly wearing ill-fitting heels when he ran for president, but he would have been right to worry.If you’re still not convinced, take the 2004 race between George W Bush and John Kerry, which hinged on the candidates’ supposed manhood to a startling degree. Bush sold himself as a down-home rancher who may have occasionally been “misunderestimated” but who you wanted to grab a beer with. Kerry, meanwhile, was a Vietnam combat veteran with a deep understanding of policy. This presented a problem for Bush: how could he be “the man’s man” when his opponent was part of the uber-masculine military?“What they did was, they went and they attacked his service record, because that was his greatest political strength,” said Jackson Katz, author of the book Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity. An advocacy group, technically formed independent of Bush, dedicated itself to questioning Kerry’s record.View image in fullscreenKatz continued of Kerry: “His attitude was like: ‘This is beneath me, to respond to these attacks.’ And it backfired. Because in the masculinity narrative, if you don’t defend your honor that’s being besmirched, you’re emasculated, you’re not strong.”Kerry, of course, lost.The architect of the attack to undermine Kerry is now working on Trump’s 2024 campaign, which is attempting to run the same playbook against Tim Walz. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has suggested that Walz left the national guard to avoid serving in the Iraq war.In fact, Walz was in the national guard for 24 years and left to run for Congress several months before his unit was deployed to Iraq. Walz has defended his record – but Team Trump isn’t typically all that worried about the truth.Masculinity subtext comes textWhen Trump descended down a golden escalator during the 2016 primary, we entered a new, far more obvious era of presidential masculinity. During that primary, Trump loved to talk about “Little Marco” Rubio, which prompted Rubio to attack Trump for his supposedly undersized hands. There is no better proof that masculinity underscores presidential elections than two candidates subtly accusing one another of having small penises.Well, maybe there is: Trump, the man who started the dick-measuring contest, won the one for the White House, too.The more people believe that traditional notions of masculinity are good and true, the more likely they were to vote for Trump in 2016, when Trump ran against a woman, and 2020, when Trump did not, Vescio found in a 2021 study. This finding held true regardless of people’s party, gender, race or level of education. It also held true even after Vescio controlled for people’s trust, or lack thereof, in government, undermining the idea that Trump’s popularity is due to his populism rather than his masculine posturing.When it comes to cosplaying masculinity, one of Trump’s greatest assets is his disinterest in reality. In other words: he’s good at making big, bold, often untrue statements, and people like that in a man.“Trump promises, more than anybody else: ‘I’m going to do this.’ Oftentimes, in violation of what the president can actually do,” said the political scientist Dan Cassino, who studies male gender identity at Fairleigh Dickinson University. “But he says he’s going to go in and fix a problem. ‘I’m going to do this on day one. Whatever Congress says doesn’t matter.’ That sort of agentic behavior is perceived as being very, very masculine.”Republicans, especially, really like this kind of behavior in a man. This can partially be chalked up to demographics. Both men and older people, who are more likely to embrace traditional gender roles, are likelier to be Republicans. It can be explained by the nature of conservatism itself. Conservatives want to preserve tradition.View image in fullscreenThere’s also another explanation: sexism.“As researchers, we differentiate between hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is: ‘Women are terrible and it’s OK to beat your wife,’” Cassino said. “Benevolent sexism is more like: ‘Oh, women are pure and precious, we have to protect them.’ That means keeping them out of things like politics, putting up separate spheres.”Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University professor who studies partisan identity, measured people’s hostile sexism by asking whether they agreed with statements like: “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men.” Republicans, she found, were on average about twice as likely as Democrats to show signs of hostile sexism.“The better predictor of being Republican is not gender, but sexism,” Mason said. “There are a lot of women who hold sexist attitudes and are pro-patriarchy and believe that women shouldn’t be in power.”I’ve encountered shades of this attitude: in January 2020, I met a woman in her 30s from Louisiana, at the March for Life, the largest annual anti-abortion gathering in the United States. Women, she told me at the time, should not be president, because they just can’t be leaders in the same way as men.“Women and men are completely different biologically,” she said. “And so for that reason, I believe that they should have specific jobs for who they are, biologically.”She planned to vote for Trump.Sexism is more than a collection of views about women – it’s a belief system about how men and women should interact. (And that men and women are the only two genders.) But as much as Trump may benefit from the GOP’s sexism, he doesn’t seem all that interested in gender relations. He has praised and attacked individual women, including his accuser E Jean Carroll, often over their looks, but he rarely speaks about women as a category.Instead, he has largely delegated that to JD Vance.In addition to claiming that “traditional masculine traits are now actively suppressed from childhood all the way through adulthood”, Vance has denigrated childfree women as “childless cat ladies”, agreed that the purpose of the “postmenopausal female” is to help raise grandchildren, and claimed women who prioritize careers over families are on “a path to misery”.“Vance is very much doing appeals, I think, less about masculinity, more about benevolent sexism,” Cassino said. “At its edges, it goes into what is called natalism, that the job of women is to reproduce, which is the extreme, extreme end of benevolent sexism.”This is the Vance innovation on the already masculine Trump ticket: he operationalizes Trump’s static vision of white-man hypermasculinity into a blueprint for how genders should live with one another. If Trump and Vance win, that blueprint could be turned into policy.View image in fullscreenThere are signs that Trump is coming around to Vance’s approach – at least when it comes to abortion, one of Trump’s biggest electoral weaknesses and an issue that has quite a bit to do with male-female relations.“I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE,” he posted to TruthSocial over the weekend. “THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE.”The feminine catch-22When Harris walked out on stage at the Democratic convention to accept her party’s nomination for president, Kelly Dittmar was immediately struck by one thing.“She didn’t wear white,” said Dittmar, who, as the director of research at Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics, makes something of a living noting how powerful women present themselves in public.White is the color of the suffragettes who fought for women’s right to vote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Democratic women regularly don it for the major rituals of US politics, including the convention. “Like half the crowd was wearing white,” Dittmar pointed out.But not Harris. She wore a navy suit and a matching pussy bow blouse.It was an unmistakable declaration: Harris did not want to focus on how she has made history. In the weeks since, she has stayed true to that stance. When presidential debate moderators brought up abortion and Donald Trump’s racist lies about her identity, Harris didn’t respond with anecdotes about her experience as a woman of color. Instead, she told the audience: “I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us.”If Hillary Clinton stands accused of focusing on her gender too much when she ran for president in 2016, Harris is doing everything she can to avoid falling into the same trap. But the braided nature of masculinity, leadership and politics leaves female political candidates in such a bind that even the act of raising an eyebrow becomes fraught.During the debate, Harris didn’t bother to hide her skepticism at Trump’s boasts, lies and rambling. “If she wants to win, Harris needs to train her face not to respond,” the pollster Frank Luntz posted on X at the time. “It feeds into a female stereotype and, more importantly, risks offending undecided voters.”It’s not clear what “female stereotype” Luntz – who said nothing of Trump’s tendency to smirk while Harris spoke – was referring to. (The female stereotype of having expressions?) But it is true that “as a female candidate, you have to be feminine, because otherwise you’re not a good woman”, Cassino said. “But you also have to be masculine, because in the US, we’ve decided that leaders are masculine. So you have to have masculine traits and feminine traits.”When it comes to telegraphing her masculine credentials, Harris has a built-in advantage: she spent years working in law enforcement, a field associated with toughness, victory and men. In her very first speech as the presumptive Democratic candidate, Harris recalled her time as a prosecutor and California attorney general.“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said, using a line that has since become a part of her stump speech. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” Translation: she knows how to dominate the worst of the worst.“Democrats don’t need Harris to go out and shoot guns in her campaign ad or on the campaign trail,” said Nichole Bauer, a Louisiana State University professor who studies political communication. “But they do need her to display those masculine qualities that we associate with political leaders, and those are really masculine qualities that we don’t always think of as being gendered – like talking about her experience as a vice-president, an attorney general, a senator.”Last week, Harris sat down with Oprah, who had been stunned to learn, during the debate, that the vice-president owns a gun. “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris said. Then she laughed. “Probably should not have said that.”That exchange encapsulated Harris’s balancing act. She’s got a gun and she’s not afraid to use it, but she’ll laugh about it. That laugh, experts said, may be one of Harris’s best assets when it comes to convincing voters that she is both competent and warm. It helps burnish her claim that she’s a “joyful warrior”, an image that “creates a distinct persona that I think bridges those gendered expectations”, Dittmar said. Joy, she continued, “alludes [to] kindness and even empathy, which is more traditionally associated with femininity and women”.There are very few true independents in the US electorate; all but 3% of self-identified independents lean Democrat or Republican. But that tiny fraction of the population can decide a close election. When judging a candidate, undecided voters tend to rely heavily on racial and gendered stereotypes, according to Bauer.“If Harris displays masculinity in a super aggressive way, similar to how Trump and Vance might do it, then she risks falling into this ‘angry Black woman’ stereotype that we’ve been socialized to think of as a negative stereotype, as something incompatible with political leadership,” Bauer said. “It’s just this really narrow set of behaviors that she has to fit into to try to show her leadership qualities.”In past elections, the men who have tried to take down Trump attempted to outman him. Rubio suggested he had a bigger you-know-what; DeSantis sold himself to voters as the grown-up version of Trump; in a 2020 debate, Joe Biden snapped: “Donald, would you just be quiet for a minute?” But running on full-tilt masculinity would never work for Harris. Not only did it not work for most of those men, but as a woman, she cannot win a masculinity-off.View image in fullscreenInstead, her supporters’ best shot at defeating Trump may be to unman him. That Lincoln Project ad, for example, framed Trump next to images of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Harris, meanwhile, is pictured giving a salute. “The images of Trump in the ad are chaotic. It’s social unrest,” pointed out Erin Cassese, a University of Delaware political science professor. The ad seems to ask: would a real man lose control like Trump did?During the debate, Harris urged viewers to go to one of Trump’s rallies. “He talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about ‘windmills cause cancer’,” she said. “And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”Those attacks – the kind of attacks that could once have been directed at Biden – also undermine Trump’s masculinity. Cassino summarized the message as: “He’s kind of old and confused and weird. This is not a masculine guy.”‘Toxic’ masculinityAs much as the internet may like to call traditional stereotypes of masculinity “toxic”, they are not necessarily bad. Success, hardiness, being a provider and protector – those can all be good qualities.The problem, for individuals, is that stereotypes of masculinity can be so strict and stifling that they are impossible for anybody to live up to. No one can be in power at all times. You might be the boss at the office, but when you get home, your teenage children are still likely to ignore your commands.And, for US society as a whole, clinging to a narrow notion of masculinity really can be toxic. “It allows for aggression towards groups that aren’t appropriately masculine, which would be different kinds of groups of men that we define as problems, and women,” Vescio said. “It masks racism and sexism.”Harris isn’t right or wrong to lean into some masculine stereotypes. After all, if a woman can harness them well enough to win the most masculine office in US history, then maybe such attitudes and behaviors won’t be considered “masculine” any more. Maybe they’re just ways that people, of all genders, can act. Maybe voters will start to value “feminine” traits in leaders, too.View image in fullscreen“The only way we can ever stop defining our politics in terms of men versus women is, have so many women run that is just not notable any more,” Cassino said.Sending Trump back to the White House may affirm his brand of masculinity on a national scale. The more Trump larps masculinity, the more Republicans grow to like it; the more deeply invested they become in masculinity, the more polarized the United States may become. People who support traditional masculinity also tend to show signs of sexism (benevolent and hostile), anti-Black racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia.But, in Dittmar’s view, voting Harris into office may indicate that people don’t want to shove women into a separate sphere.“We’re voting on a lot of things, but among them is that version of leadership and our evaluation of these gendered versions of it,” Dittmar said. “As well as, even more broadly, our sense of the appropriate roles of women, the ways in which women should be treated by our political leaders.” More

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      The Cass Report: Biased or Balanced?

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      More from our inbox:Child Tax Credits Can Save Women’s LivesWake Up, RepublicansRicardo TomásTo the Editor:Re “The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids,” by Lydia Polgreen (column, Aug. 18):Thank you to Lydia Polgreen for this thoughtful, well-researched piece. She clearly identified the faulty and dangerous unspoken premise of the Cass report and much of the reporting on this topic: that being transgender is socially deviant and harmful, and we should do everything in our collective power to reserve gender-affirming care for those we deem virtuous enough to become “good” members of society.She also pointed out critics’ double standards. Our medical system routinely provides — without controversy — the same gender-affirming medications to cisgender children and adolescents that it provides to trans children and adolescents. The issue is clearly not “concern for children” but the deep-rooted transphobia that this “concern” masks.What if we didn’t think of being trans as being deviant or broken? What if we saw it for what it is: an identity as old as human existence that is as worthy of respect and celebration as any other, especially amid this climate of fear? What if we focused less on creating unnecessary barriers to care and more on protecting the right to self-determination and access to health care that respects each person’s unique needs?Libby Hartle-TyrrellBrooklynTo the Editor:Lydia Polgreen speculates on the legitimacy of the Cass report in what I see as an effort all too common among public figures: to burnish their liberal credentials at the expense of families like mine. They state that pediatric gender transition is too politicized, but blame only the Republicans. But I wish, I beg, that they talk to parents like me.Many of us are liberal, (formerly) Democratic professionals whose kids have been caught up in the left’s politicization of this issue. Our kids — who are smart, but struggle with mental health issues and anxiety — spent too much time online during Covid and self-diagnosed themselves as gender dysphoric. Meanwhile, activists have aggressively pushed an affirm-or-else, one-size-fits-all policy on educators, mental health providers and doctors.This confluence has created a dystopian nightmare for well-educated, thoughtful and compassionate parents who urge caution and question medicalization. People who we used to align with politically are telling our kids that we are transphobic and support their cutting us off. We grieve and watch in horror as our vulnerable kids permanently scar their bodies, reproductive organs and voices.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kamala Harris Wants You To Retire Your ‘Future Is Female’ Sign

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      When Kamala Harris took the stage in Chicago last week, she spoke of her “trailblazer” mother and her encouraging father — “Don’t let anything stop you.” She told of how the sexual abuse of her best friend led her to become a prosecutor. She encouraged people to imagine abortion rights being restored in a Harris presidency. What she did not do, as she described her “unlikely journey,” was state the obvious — and that silence spoke volumes.As the first Black woman and first South Asian to receive a major party nomination, she was all but expected to talk about her candidacy as a historic first. She could have easily tipped her hat to the galvanizing power of “representation” or referred to the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” that Hillary Clinton had tried so hard to shatter. Some enthusiastic delegates had dressed in suffragist white, but she was not among them. She wore a dark navy suit. That color, too, spoke volumes.We’re only beginning to grapple with the audacity of what Kamala Harris is doing: She’s trying to take identity politics out of presidential politics. Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Harris is savvy enough to know how important identity is in America today. But if identity is in, gender and racial politics are out. As she put it on CNN on Thursday night, when asked during her first interview as the Democratic nominee to respond to Donald Trump’s attacks on her identity: “Same old tired playbook — next question.”She aspires to be the first post-gender POTUS. So many American voters loathe being asked to assess their candidates through the lens of gender and race, and they cringe at the performative nature of identity politics — including, yes, Mrs. Clinton and that ever-present glass ceiling, as well as the argument that her supporters were “voting with their vaginas” if they dared to feel inspired by it.The metaphor may have yielded feel-good empowerment for a while — and lots of clever merch — but we all know the outcome. And how many times can you declare “The future is female,” tattered sign in hand, before it starts to get awkward?Ms. Harris is a woman, and a Black woman, and a woman of Jamaican and South Asian descent, and the first woman to be vice president. But we know all that. Other people can talk about history; she’ll be too busy making it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Push for Gender Equality in E.U.’s Top Roles Looks Set to Fall Short

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      Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, asked member countries to nominate both men and women for commission roles.The European Union has presented itself as a champion for promoting gender equality, adopting rules requiring companies to increase the number of women on their boards and pushing employers to address the gender pay gap.So when Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, asked recently for member countries to nominate both male and female candidates for leadership positions within the 27-member bloc’s executive arm, it was seen as an attempt to apply that vision to its own halls. The problem is, few have listened.Only five countries — Sweden, Finland, Spain, Portugal and Croatia — have put forward female candidates ahead of a Friday deadline. Seventeen countries have nominated only men for their commissioner posts. (Three countries have yet to submit names.) Each country gets one leadership slot.It’s possible that some countries could still change their nominees ahead of the deadline. But the current slate of nominees suggests that the European Commission’s leadership team will likely be composed mostly of men for the next five years — and analysts said the public snub of Ms. von der Leyen’s request signals her leadership could be weakened.“It’s not a small thing, asking for gender balance and clearly not getting it,” said a senior European official. “It’s not just one, two countries.” Speaking on condition of anonymity because the process was ongoing, the official said that indicated Ms. von der Leyen’s relations with member states would be more difficult.Ms. von der Leyen, a conservative German politician, secured a second five-year term in a vote last month.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why is alleged predator Bill Clinton still welcome in the Democratic party? | Moira Donegan

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      One of the grim lessons of the #MeToo movement and its long backlash is this: whether someone finds a sexual abuse allegation credible largely depends on their pre-existing opinion of the man accused. When a woman comes forward with an account of a man’s mistreatment of her – be it humiliating boorishness, violent rape or any of the range of degradations and hurts that fall along the wide spectrum between – the listener’s response is fairly predictable. If they hate the accused man, they’ll believe his accuser. If they like him, they’ll say it’s bullshit.This rule holds, I am sorry to say, even for women who identify themselves as feminists. It held for Gloria Steinem, the famed feminist now in her 90s, who in 1998 defended Clinton amid his slew of sex scandals and abuse allegations in the pages of the New York Times, dismissing the allegations against him as trivial and making an unconvincing case that the offense she took at similar allegations against Clarence Thomas was different. It held true, most famously, for Bill Clinton’s wife, the liberal feminist icon Hillary Clinton, who has remained silently beside her husband throughout each of the allegations against him – and retained her feminist credibility despite her loyalty to an allegedly abusive man that I can only describe as canine.People who like Bill Clinton, or who find him convenient for their own goals, have a long history of underplaying the multiple allegations of sexual harassment and violence that he faces from at least four women. They say that Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who sued Bill Clinton for sexual harassment after the then governor brought her to his hotel room, propositioned her and exposed himself, is lying – even though Jones has multiple corroborating witnesses, and even though her story has not changed in more than 30 years.They say that Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says that Clinton raped her in a hotel room in 1978, when he was Arkansas attorney general, is lying, too – even though Broaddrick, like Jones, told multiple people of Clinton’s attack at the time.They say that Monica Lewinsky, the 22-year-old unpaid intern whom Clinton carried on an affair with in the White House when he was 49 and the most powerful person in the world, technically consented to the sex acts that Clinton asked her to do – an insistence that betrays a startlingly simple-minded and willfully obtuse understanding of sexual ethics.They echo Clinton’s denials of wrongdoing in all these cases, against all these women. That is, at least, what they say when they acknowledge the allegations about Bill Clinton’s conduct at all. Mostly, they ignore them – as Bill Clinton has, as his wife, Hillary Clinton has, and as Bill Clinton’s popular legacy seems to do.Bill Clinton’s supporters ignore his accusers because they can. These women’s dignity, their equality and their right to control their own bodies matter less to them than their esteem for Bill Clinton – less than whether he can deliver a few votes, make a zinger on television or look nice in a suit.On Wednesday night, the third night of the Democratic national convention, the whole party ignored these women when they gave Bill Clinton, a multiply accused alleged sexual harasser and rapist, a rousing welcome at Chicago’s United Center. The former president was given a prime-time speaking spot, trotted out like a prize and applauded like a hero.Are these people not embarrassed? Do they not, at least, take note of the hypocrisy involved? After all, the 2024 election is quickly shaping up to be about gender, with the boorish Trump, creepy, sex-obsessed JD Vance and the radically anti-choice Republican party turning the contest into a referendum on the status of women in American society. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee who will seek to become the nation’s first female president on election day, has taken on the mantle of the women’s struggle – not only in the symbolism of her candidacy, but in the tenor of her advocacy, in which she has championed the “freedom” of women to control their own bodies and lives.These are noble goals, ones that the Democrats can be proud of pursuing; but they are not commensurate with celebrations of an alleged rapist, with pomp and obsequiousness trotted out for a man who allegedly habitually sexually harassed women who worked for him and carried on an affair with an intern young enough to be his daughter. Sexual abuse, too, is hostile to women’s freedom – the freedom of women to live, work and participate in public without the threat of sexual force. This is a kind of gendered freedom that Bill Clinton has made it abundantly clear that he does not respect.The call for women’s freedom from rape, abuse and harassment has always been the least popular and most politically fraught feminist cause. Abortion has always had more appeal to male voters as a political issue. Misogynist men – in a tradition that extends from the Playboy founder (and alleged rapist) Hugh Hefner to Barstool Sports founder (and alleged perpetrator of sexual assault) Dave Portnoy to former president (and alleged rapist) Bill Clinton – have long supported abortion rights, in part because they understand abortion not as a matter of women’s fundamental freedom and dignity but as a matter of men’s increased sexual access to women and decreased responsibility for the resulting pregnancies.These prurient, sexually entitled misogynists are not all Republicans – rape, and its apologism, have always been bipartisan endeavors – but they are not the kind of voters that Democrats should be courting. A bargain in which women’s right to end a pregnancy is made in exchange for men’s right to rape, harass and abuse women is not an acceptable one. We can do better: we can reach for a version of America in which women are truly free and equal, endowed with all the bodily sovereignty, self-determination and sexual autonomy that men are. That’s not the world that Bill Clinton represents, and it’s not a world that a party that insists on celebrating him can deliver.Bill Clinton has been out of office for nearly three decades. In that time, his once-rosy status as a liberal hero has thankfully dimmed, even if his alleged history of sexual abuse has not played a sufficient role in the reassessment of his reputation. Liberals now rightly look back at Clinton’s crime bill with horror; his devastating cuts to the welfare system were punitive and cruel, hurting women and children the most. He modeled a vision of a conservative Democratic party, one less committed to its principles than in cynically trading them away for a chance at power.His vision of change has failed, and his political project has been revealed as morally bankrupt. It’s not clear that he can even deliver many votes; a large swath of the American electorate is now too young to remember much of his presidency, aside from the sex scandals. It’s time for Democrats to send the old man home. And to tell him to keep his hands to himself.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      How Kamala Harris Is Already Changing the Face of Presidential Power

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      I have not been the biggest fan of Kamala Harris, but to my surprise, the candidate who underwhelmed in 2020 is gone. I have watched all of candidate Harris’s public appearances since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for a sense of how she intends to run and possibly govern. The audiences have been vastly different, among them: the annual conclave of Zeta Phi Beta sorority, a National Federation of Teachers convention and the Philadelphia rally where the Harris-Walz ticket made its first official appearance.What I took away: Kamala Harris is a different candidate than we saw four years ago. She is even a different rhetorician than we saw six months ago.Nominee Harris lands her applause lines. The former prosecutor is comfortable going on the attack. Her most consistent message is that Donald Trump wants to send America back to the Dark Ages. Unlike her predecessor, she relishes calling Trump out by name. Even her wacky humor, which has been mocked on social media, suddenly works. She sounds authentic. That’s the holy grail of electoral politics. Every wide-jawed cackle she offers the audience, every twinkle in her eye as she pokes at Trump — it all comes off as someone who is in on the joke. That is hard for any candidate but it is an almost impossible tightrope for a Black female candidate to walk.Authenticity is a mirage. Americans crave the performance of authenticity as a sign that our values are in safe hands — hands just like ours. Of course, people who study this stuff for a living don’t quite agree on what authenticity is. It’s a “you know it when you see it” situation. Political candidates have to negotiate ideas about identity with an audience’s expectations of who should be in power. A tall white guy with a healthy head of hair simply looks presidential.That’s where gender tripped up Hillary Clinton, the first, most viable female candidate for president. Americans were used to looking at her — as first lady, as a congresswoman, as secretary of state and as a national obsession. But for many reasons, a lot of voters (although not a majority of voters) did not think she was authentic enough to be president. She never figured out how to communicate presidential power during her campaign. She couldn’t make the idea of a president look like a woman.Kamala Harris has an even more difficult task: She has to make the presidency look like a Black woman.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More